Iowa's ESSA plan: Five takeaways for replacing No Child Left Behind

Each year, the Iowa Department of Education releases its Condition of Education report. Here are 7 facts about Iowa schools from its 2016 report.
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Textbooks that are only a few years old sit stacked next to lockers on the last day of the high school at Charter Oak-Ute School on Wednesday, May 31, 2017, in Charter Oak. The books will try to be resold before being thrown out.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)Buy Photo

Iowa leaders are seeking federal approval for a new school accountability plan that will replace No Child Left Behind's approach to holding schools accountable for student performance.

The Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015. It gives state leaders broader authority to use their own measures of success when evaluating schools.

Iowa's ESSA plan, which was released in final form Monday, establishes ways to identify and support struggling schools. The 231-page document will be submitted Monday to the U.S. Department of Education for approval.

The plan moves Iowa from a sanctions-based model under No Child Left Behind, in which schools faced consequences for not bettering student achievement, to a support-based model. Struggling schools will develop improvement plans using state or district guidance.

Only schools that educate a large percentage of low-income children, and receive Title I funds, may receive federal money if identified for improvement. That totals about $6 million annually for Iowa.

Iowa's plan distinguishes between "comprehensive" improvement needed for all students, in which state overview is required, and "targeted" improvement for certain subgroups of students, which requires districts to develop plans submitted to the state.

Schools will be identified for support using spring 2018 math and reading tests, plus other educational measures such as graduation rates. Based on preliminary estimates, roughly 30 schools would fall into comprehensive and 300 into targeted support.

Key parts include:

1. Struggling schools will be identified using multiple measures, including academic tests, rate of student growth, graduation rate and a measure of post-secondary readiness. That's opposed to the more singular math and reading benchmarks laid out in No Child Left Behind.

2. The plan sets academic goals that increase over time, but less dramatically than those outlined in No Child Left Behind, which required 100 percent of students to reach grade-level math and reading benchmarks by 2014.

In third grade, for example, the state's ESSA goal is to increase the percentage of third-graders at or above grade-level reading from 76 percent in 2015 to 78.5 percent in 2021.

3. It has more "ambitious" growth targets for poor and minority students.

While the third-grade reading goal increases a half percentage point per year overall, the increase for poor and minority students is 1 percentage point growth per year. This is an effort to decease the state's proficiency gap.

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President Barack Obama has signed into law a major education law setting U.S. public schools on a new course of accountability. During the signing, Obama praised the law's bipartisan support in Congress. (Dec. 10)
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For example, by 2021 the goal for third-graders reading at grade-level is 54 percent for black students, 65.9 percent for Hispanic students, 80.6 percent for Asian students and 83.1 percent for white students.

5. Iowa's evaluation of schools could include measures of measures, a complex way to use multiple benchmarks of success.

For example, a "Post-Secondary Readiness Index" is expected to be developed, and could include college remediation rates or college enrollment within one year of graduation, among other ways to quantify post-high school achievement. The state's plan calls for developing a task force to create, receive feedback on and ultimately pilot or model a PSRI.